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Certified Professional Installation

Security Camera Installation is backed by a brand trusted by organizations like the United States Department of the Treasury, General Motors and NASA. With an unheard of 3 year warranty and 100% free support that never expires.

We're extremely happy to help you set up your system and troubleshoot any issues. Our support hours are from 9AM-7PM Monday - Friday (EST) and we are available via chat, email, phones, and remote PC screen-sharing. You can reach us at 866-414-2553.

IP Camera Bitrate and Compression: Not All 1080P Cameras are Created Equal

We often get asked why our cameras look so much better than other brands - even with similar specs.

*This page talks about the bitrate needed for H.264 encoding and H.265 encoding, so let's explain them both real quick. H.264 encoding is used by 90% of the surveillance products out there. H.265 is being adopted by some manufacturers in 2018, including SCW. H.265 reduces the bandwidth requirements by about half. It also reduces the storage requirements of video footage and allows you to store 20-40% more footage on the same hard drive. H.265 (like H.264 before it) is the result of a collaboration between Apple, Microsoft, and The Moving Picture Experts Group.

H.265 has a rather hefty licensing fee, and this guide covers a practice by some low cost manufacturers who put underperforming processors in their cameras. Both H.265 and H.264 video can look good, but H.264 takes more processing power for the same result. Low Cost manufacturers almost never pay the H.265 licensing fee, so they almost exclusively use the older H.264 technology. For a more full explanation on why SCW picked H.265, see our MJPEG, H.264, H.265 encoding guide.

The difference is that you can trust our components to perform according to their specs without having to deeply compress the video.

Good quality 1080P video occurs when the compression is at about 5Mbps in bitrate when encoded by H.264 or 2.5Mbps at H.265, but many cheap cameras only can use the older H.264 and their processors are so poor that they can only send a max of 2Mbps in video (part of which is used by the substream).

This example is extreme, but there are some really irresponsible sellers with cameras with these specs:

This image is 1080P, but made by a video processor that can only handle 256kb of video data per second and can't record in the latest file types.

This image is also 1080P, but made by our cameras. The image was created by utilizing 4Mbps (4096kbps) of video data per second at H.264 (but the same image could be made with 2.5 Mbps at H.265).

A less extreme example: Let's compare our 4Mbps cameras to a 2Mbps camera

This image is 1080P, but with H.264 encoding and given only 2Mbps (2048kbps) of video data per second of processing power.

This image is also 1080P, but made by our cameras. It was set to handle 4Mbps (4096kbps) of video data per second.

The difference between the two images is the processor in the camera and the version of the H.26X. They are both 1080P and they both have the same number of pixels.

The difference is that the processor on the first camera was really, really slow and the version of H.26X was not the latest.

All video is compressed. Compression can be a good thing. Compression is the technological innovation that allowed you to fit every song you own on your iPod when only 10 uncompressed songs fit on a CD. Compression helps video files not take up too much space. Compression is ok when you don't notice it, the problem is when things get out of range.

Most cheaper cameras are cheaper because the manufacturer is putting slow no name processors inside them and using outdated compression technology.

How much Processing Power do SCW cameras have?

Our 1080P and 4MP Admiral Line cameras (which launched in 2018) can utilize* up to 8Mbps in processing power for video encoding. Our 4K line can utilize up to 16Mbps in processing power for video encoding.

*We use the words "can utilize" rather than "have" because the Admiral line have Video Content Analytics, which uses some part of the processing power of the processor chipset. The numbers that we list here are not the total processing power, but rather the potion of the processing power that can be dedicated for video encoding.